The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The GOOD–Full disclosure: I’ve been suspicious of SA2020 since it started, but the best news I’ve heard in years started leaking out of SA2020 about 6 weeks ago. The Mayor’s educational focus will be early childhood.

By the time our most at-risk kids hit first grade, they are already 2-3 years behind. More and better early childhood education can solve that. Here’s the problem with (what’s leaked out about) the Mayor’s plan.

30 years of research and a decade of brain science clearly shows that the critical years are 0-3. The Mayor’s plan starts at age 4.

I understand why. It’s the problem of “do-ability”. The 1/8th of a cent tax will “only” yield $24m per year. Adding both capacity and quality to our city’s early childhood system could take 4-6 times that amount. So, instead of “solving” the problem of early childhood education, two Cadillac Pre-K centers are being proposed.

When Kevin Wolff was a city councilman, he recommended adding early childhood to the city charter. He felt that, “The state basically says grace over K-12. The federal government funds college through post-grad. Nobody is taking responsibility for birth to school entry. It should be the local community.”

Amending the city charter also got placed in the “too hard box”. It shouldn’t be now. Councilman Soules has placed mid-term replacement elections on the ballot. If the Mayor thinks early childhood is critical, he should team up with (now) Commissioner Wolff and amend the city charter to make young children at least as important as potholes.

The Bad–There is lots of bad to go around this one. The way that the closing of Pecan Valley Golf Course was handled was one click below amateurish. In this age of social media, spin, PR and lobbyists, all of the above were MIA in the weeks leading up to the closing. Then bad got worse.

The concept for replacing the golf course is at least interesting and possibly quite cool. It also fits in nicely with Military City USA and what San Antonio has become to wounded warriors.

The extremely difficult 18-hole course would be replaced by a 9-hole, par-3, all ADA accessible course that is designed for wounded warriors and military retirees. The greens would be wide and flat, with the sand traps level with the course, so the golf wheelchairs could go straight into the traps.

Surrounding the course would be accessible apartments and retire-in-place housing. At the base of the course would be a cycling center, modeled after the Velodrome and BMX course at the London Olympics.

I’ve been told that the two most popular sports for wounded warriors are golf and cycling. Cycling works beautifully on the site, because it ties directly in to the Salado linear park and the cycling community has been calling for a Velodrome/BMX site since the early 90s.

Once the developers got into the game and started presenting their concept to the community, some surprisingly ugly NIMBY reared its head. At one neighborhood meeting, a resident who was impressed by the plan remarked that You guys really need this, just not in this neighborhood. That gets us to ugly.

The Ugly–Streetcars. Everywhere I go, I run into someone surprising who opposes streetcars. What is also surprising is that they feel (a) helpless to do anything about it, and (b) are considering opposing the city bond in protest. That would be ugly.

Community activists from every side of town speak against it, because they believe that $200m spent on streetcars in a low population, low congestion, high quality streets community means that the streets won’t be fixed in their high population, high congestion, low quality streets neighborhood. Reverse Robin Hood I’ve heard it called. “We are robbing from the poor and giving it to the rich.” Ugly

Worse is the feeling of helplessness. “There doesn’t seem to be anything we can do about it.” What gets talked about is voting against the city bonds in protest. Also ugly.

None of them want the bonds to fail, but they feel like they have no other way of being heard. With less than two months until the election and no formal opposition, I can’t imagine the bonds failing. That involved, informed people think that voting against a bond is the only way to get the attention of our community’s leadership is ugly.

The obstacles to serious community input – a vote – on streetcars is slowly polluting the waters of community trust. That is how we ended up with the term limits we had for 20 years. We are creeping back in that direction.